Posted
by
timothyon Sunday February 26, 2012 @10:57PM
from the why-are-they-so-mean? dept.

owenferguson writes "WikiLeaks has begun leaking a cache of over 5 million internal emails from the the Texas-headquartered 'global intelligence' company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. The associated news release can be found on pastebin."

after the Stratfor website went live, one could log in with the username/password combo of "username" and "password". If that's how much attention they paid to protecting their rather expensive subscription service, one wonders is if the security of their email servers was any better.

I guess I reconcile them thus: There will always be a market for information. I hope our people do more buying than selling. Selling information you are entrusted to protect is despicable. Buying information you need is understandable.

To say that it is the buyer's fault is like saying "If everyone were perfect, X would happen"

I believe systems must be designed for the real world, not utopia [wikipedia.org]. I hope our systems work better. Even if they are based on that evil money I never seem to have enough of...

And their CEO is toast... the word of even this leaking out via intercepted e-mail: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/leaked-email-shows-stratfor-ceo-george-friedman-resigned-two-hours-ago-over-latest-breach

Zerohedge is all over this like white on rice. For those complaining about boring content in the leaks, see ZH's coverage on the e-mails relating to Obama's inability to maintain a liberal/progressive position and the Republicans' ability to field a decent candidate: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/stratfor-email-leak-reveals-insider-views-obama-emanuel-romney

Sure, we all knew that the players of the American political football game hadn't yet figured out which direction to run on the field, which team they're playing for, or why their ball is spherical and made of pentagons and hexagons, but it's fun to read about this half-assed private intelligence agency saying the same things that we've all been thinking AND about their supposed contacts with shadowy billionaire Powers That Be saying the same: that the Democrats have no spine and the Republicans no brains.

I'll wait 'til I've seen verification before I believe it or not... but it's real or not, I still found this line funny:

Regarding the latest breach, Stratfor is fully in control of the situation

If it's real, I also wonder about:

To be clear: We certainly do not condone any criminal activities by groups like Anonymous or other hackers

I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't)... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.

I'll wait 'til I've seen verification before I believe it or not... but it's real or not, I still found this line funny:

Regarding the latest breach, Stratfor is fully in control of the situation

If it's real, I also wonder about:

To be clear: We certainly do not condone any criminal activities by groups like Anonymous or other hackers

I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't)... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.

Sure, just like the way the government can't easily conduct certain forms of surveillance because that would run afoul of the 4th Amendment... but they can contract that out, purchasing the same information from companies conducting the same surveillance, and that's perfectly cromulent.

Yet, if you commit a crime by proxy, you're just as guilty as your hireling. For example, if you hired a contract killer you would be convicted for murder along with your mercenary. And unlike the US Constitution, the law under which you'd be convicted is not the highest law of the land.

Sure, just like the way the government can't easily conduct certain forms of surveillance because that would run afoul of the 4th Amendment... but they can contract that out, purchasing the same information from companies conducting the same surveillance, and that's perfectly cromulent.

Of course, because big governments are bad.

That's why many very clever US people would rather have a small government, and let the corporations and individuals be more free to do what they want.

I mean, this is a group that makes their money by paying off people to get them information, in ways that are hinted are against the law (likely they're getting other people to break the law of other countries, even if the company themselves aren't)... but they're against hackers that break the law? It seems a a bit hypocritical to me.

It's only hacking if it is done by someone not in power, or not on the behest of someone in power.

Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused "gravy train" that sprung up after WikiLeaks' Afghanistan disclosures:

"[Is it] possible for us to get some of that 'leak-focused' gravy train? This is an obvious fear sale, so that's a good thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don't, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet... Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of 'leak-focused' network security that focuses on preventing one's own employees from leaking sensitive information... In fact, I'm not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution."

DOW didn't buy on a whim, many people spent a lot of time in the process of buying the corp. Simply selling a corporation does not allow it to escape justice; despite them usually escaping justice anyway. DOW bought Union Carbide knowing the issues and expecting to never have to factor that cost other than maybe a few PR statements and lawyers considered minor baggage in the acquisition.

It has everything to do with DOW; because Union Carbide still exists within a bigger corporation - simply because the name changed and some people shuffled around does not make them disappear, it means the new name becomes the one we rail against.

That's like saying that if you bought a car from someone that they used to run over an old lady, somehow you're now responsible for her murder. It just doesn't work that way.

Stephen King cultivated a loyal readership among people who suspect that it doesn't actually not work that way.

Zyklon B is still in production in the Czech Republic in the factory Draslovka Kolin a.s. in the city of Kolin, under the tradename Uragan D2, and is sold for the purpose of eradicating insects and small animals.

The company acquiring Union Carbide has also acquired all the liabilities along with the assets. Dow has pretty much everything to do with Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster. If Dow did not want the "baggage" that came along with the Union Carbide purchase, they should have stayed away from it.

The company acquiring Union Carbide has also acquired all the liabilities along with the assets. Dow has pretty much everything to do with Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster. If Dow did not want the "baggage" that came along with the Union Carbide purchase, they should have stayed away from it.

How exactly did Dow have "pretty much everything to do with[...] the Bhopal disaster" when the the closest they come is owning the company that at one point in the past owned the company that owned the plant? The Bhopal plant was run by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), and UCIL was sold to an Indian company back in the early 90's. About 7 years later Dow came along and bought Union Carbide. So not only is there a few layers of ownership in between, there is also a gap of several years. Why doesn't Eveready Industries India Ltd (the company that UCIL turned into) get the "baggage" associated with Bhopal?

nothing will change, nothing has changed, its a 30 second flash in headlines, and a 10 second clip on one Simpsons episode (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDEu0-1TW-c) once the suits in the tv room get a clue.

Its a simple fact, no one cares, or no one cares to understand... so big fucking what? nothing has changed a single bit.

I am about to show my age, but once upon a time, news organizations were amongst the premier intelligence gathering organizations on Earth. No shit. Reporters could discover sources that foreign agents could never approach, keep secrets, and even upend a Presidency. Think of that. Now, they are just parts of conglomerates' entertainment divisions. So, what happened to the really good investigative journalists, who could dig diamonds from piles of crap? Well, some of them are at Stratfor.

No, that is the rose-tinted version of the past. The reality of Watergate was that the FBI was at war with the White House; Deep Throat (Mark Felt) himself was up to his eyeballs in corruption, having overseen COINTELPRO, and later convicted for it. Deep Throat was funneling information to Woodward and Bernstein for selfish political purposes.

Supposed hard-nosed "investigative journalist" Woodward now makes his living as a conduit for White House insiders who want to get their white-washed version of history into his hagiographic "behind the scenes" books. He is a total tool of the American political elite.

Really? Since it's a place with around twenty employees in total you could easily list all of those "really good investigative journalists" at Stratfor in a comment here. Please do so. Then compare that to the list of investigative journalists at a major newspaper and the awards that they have won. Where's their Robert Fisk (whether you think he's biased for daring to write things criticising Israel or not) or anyone remotely similar?If they are bylines that we know then why not list them instead of jus

No, as a fellow geezer I must say that the GP is correct. Back then they didn't have stories about some two-bit actor's drug problems runnning two weeks straight or having "who won 'dancing with the stars last night'" type nonsense. On Oscar night they might have mentioned who won a few on the news the next morning instead of having the entire "Good Morning America" so-called "news" show entirely fixated on Oscar and only Oscar as they did this morning. The news divisions have been completely co-opted by th

...considering this company, at first glance at TFS, seems to be primarily concerned with passing information of a secure and sensitive nature between not only State agencies of different countries but also defence contractors which themselves are concerned also with collecting and dispersing such information for whatever purposes; I'm concerned that it is dealing with the company which had the dubious honour of processing in and storing the UK census data from 2011. This is considered live information and as far as I'm concerned, what with the nature of the questions* contained in that census (I was a refuser for the following reason), that information in the wrong hands (ie ANY agency or individual working under the flag of a different nation - ANY DIFFERENT NATION!) is a persistent threat to national security, and whoever authorised such an arrangement should hang by their bollocks. If Lockheed Martin are involved with such a company, how much of the UK census data have they passed through this company to other companies or agencies, or how much of that data that this company has been entrusted with has found its way to eg DHS? I for one am very concerned.

*ie, what's the occupation of every adult of working age in the household, what's their earning power, how many hours do they work, how often individuals travel abroad, where they travel to...

I haven't read the leaks, but if they do prove that Stratfor had done or is doing something illegal, would the U.S. government take legal action? Given the fact that the government has been so anti-wikileaks, would it be wise for them to use wikileaks as a source to prosecute people in Stratfor?

On a related note, what if the information wikileaks had released was obtained completely illegally? I'm not saying that's the case here, but hypothetically speaking, if information was obtained by illegal hacking or trespassing, would the government be able to take any legal action against the company?

They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

...to this...

A company that fronts as an intelligence publisher... but is secretly an intelligence publisher?

...instead of something like:A company that fronts as an intelligence publisher... but secretly acts as an intelligence agency.

Even if that introduction wasn't clear enough, the remainder of the press release would have cleared things up quite well.

Me: "No? Then what looks like a bear and acts like a bear and IS a bear that ISN'T a Bear?"

Her: "A BERENSTAIN BEAR!!!!"

My daughter, the genius. If the CIA is a bear, Stratfor is a Berenstain Bear. Kind of like how a Southern Mansion is a Southern Mansion, but a Southern Mansion Style McMansion in the exurbs of San Diego is a caricature of a Mansion. Both comfy places to live, the McMansions just fake and cheezy and third rate as fuckall.

I am seriously baffled that there are people who didn't realize that Stratfor gathers up and analyzes the intelligence they publish.

Basically, what I think the GP poster is saying is that they're a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher... but secretly generates intelligence. To publish. And, as a private company they save some of it for paying customers.

I haven't finished reading every document in the leak (and probably won't if I don't find something interesting soon) but so far it's not really revealing anything that anyone who's heard of Stratfor didn't know. Except maybe a level of security incompetence (which is really what Anonymous is best at revealing).

- They are sometimes used by the US government (and others), presumably to provide a hint of plausible deniability.- They're trading on markets using information gained via espionage, sometimes with information gained at the urging of government agencies.- They're all-around scary dudes with close ties to our government and our financial organizations.

We'll get more details, but those crazies with delusional rantings about shady para-governmental organizations with nearly boundless resources and a shortage of moral or ethical restriction? Yeah, they're going to be busy for a while.

If we learned anything form 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq it's that government internal intelligence seems hampered by ideological slant and internal politics. Stratfor, on the other hand, tries to be as accurate as possible and even publishes how accurate it's predictions were on a quarterly and yearly basis. Quite frankly, I would be more worried if governments weren't using services like Stratfor.

Not to mention national and international law, some level of oversight and what passes for morals and ethics. The same justification was used re the hiring of mercenary companies as they could do things outside the laws that restricted the normal armed forces.

A private intelligence/security company working at this level and unhindered by governmental limitations makes me very nervous.

It also makes me nervous that national security information is being passed to a private non-governmental entity in the hope of a job after leaving 'public service'. Such people should be prosecuted as traitors.

I think you need to go back and re-read some of this information, as you've obviously missed a lot.

There are documents describing plans for insider trading. There are tons of references to how they collect and pay for their info, which are shady at best and criminal at worst.

Stratfor claims to be "just a newsletter site that does some intel analysis", but these emails make it very clear that they also do intel COLLECTION, which is a completely different ball-game and far more likely to reveal illegal dealings. There's even more than that.

Basically, they're a vertical integration of the private intel world. They solicit clients for analyis reports, data collection and action plans. They themselves are directly involved with the data collection and marketing it to potential buyers.

So they're actually covert intelligence operatives that will sell to anyone with enough money but have access to a lot of classified US material that claim to be "just intelligence analysts."

Stratfor's use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to "utilise the intelligence" it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS: "What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like".

Insider trading might be enough, but this isn't insider trading. If you are trading on information you're getting from an external source, it is, by definition, outsider trading. Unless they were trading Stratfor shares.

John is on the board of director's of company A.John tells his friend Dave, that company B is in secret talks about buying out company A.Dave tells his friend Charlie, that he should buy lots of stocks in company A.

Dave gets his information from an outside source, but I'm fairly confident it still counts as insider trading.

i didn't know that Goldman Sachs bought a board membership and that it basically saved stratfor from going out of business.

i didn't know that GS was trading on information from stratfor. it creates all kinds of possibilities for GS to manipulate markets even more than it already does. it would be like if GS had someone sitting on the New York Times board or the Bloomberg board. it doesn't look very good to have people who make billions of dollars off of news reports actively having an influencing over the editorial decisions of that publishing body. but thats exactly what GS has here with stratfor and 'stratcap'.

now, add on top that Stratfor is allegedly bribing people for information, or using threats and intimidation, or 'pscyhological, sexual control' of sources to get information. you basically have Goldman Sachs directly involved in this stuff, its just all kinds of weird stuff.

Goldman has a history of inserting itself into relationships with other companies, and then doing weird things that are hugely conflicted. A perfect example being the Paulson hedge fund and the ABACUS junk mortgage CDOs they did in the mid 2000s. Then there is what they did on Nymex - being on the board, and being a huge trader at the same time, manipulating the oil market (see The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman).

Either way it's a newspaper clipping service with less than twenty employees and delusions of granduer.Look at the comments on that last story about these people to see how well their self promotion worked. Restoring their computer systems was seen by many here as an epic task and not the reality of dealing with a server or two and twenty or less PCs and laptops.

I don't see how as a practical matter you could be one and not the other and be any good at your job. A newspaper publisher either has to do its own journalism, or it has to just aggregate other peoples. An intelligence company needs to either aggregate other peoples information (which is really analysis, rather than data sourcing), and it will need a source of that information. The difference between a publisher that contracts independent sources, and a company with regular employees doing these things is not that big a deal.

The actual article isn't 'intelligence agency vs intelligence publisher' it's an intelligence company that as one of the things it's doing is trying to bribe people for insider information, and to resell that insider information in violation of corrupt practices and insider trading rules.

If you want information (call it journalism, intelligence, verification or whatever) on the health of say Hugo Chavez, your options are limited on how to get that which isn't illegal (assuming he isn't telling the truth). If you're being contracted to train intelligence analysts or agents from a government agency you need to have people who have past experience with intelligence gathering and analysis. To accomplish either of those things it's pretty obvious what they're up to. How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs. That's the nature of the business and insofar as journalism is legal, it is legal.

The only thing particularly more sleazy than the nature of the business itself is the insider trading and related work (either paying off private or government persons for information about information that is not yet public). That's the sort of thing that journalists, parliament/congress etc. have particular legal walls around, because you really really really cannot use information that will be public before it becomes public. It shouldn't even be surprising that these things happen, it's only a matter of if or when they get caught by people who aren't in on the deal.

Just in general doing business in most of the world requires paying off the right people, in cash, in the right currency, at the right time. Everyone knows it, no one admits to it, no one really does anything about it because that's just how the world works. It used to be tax deductible for businesses in germany to pay bribes overseas for example, it's just the cost of doing business.

"How do journalists get sources or info? Right, either you pay them, or they volunteer for the promise of future payoffs."

actually a lot of journalists get info by asking questions of people who, for various reasons, want the truth to be out there. or, at least, their side of the story to be out there in the public. sometimes sources find the journalists, not the other way around. paying sources is generally frowned upon by the professional journalism industry.

"[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control... This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase"

At the very least, they're looking to coerce or bribe an Israeli intelligence informant. It's certainly well into the grey area. Their great efforts to set up a pseudo-independent StratCap StratFund for StratInsider StratTrading stinks of SEC violations if they leveraged information gained in one space (by its nature, illicit) for gains in another.

Re: Seriously, how have they...
Disinformation, selective leaks, like to see who is interested, who can work out what. All the chatter lights up a lot of hidden blogs, press people who can still think.
95% can be true, a few real gems in the released works and then that small fake amount that makes the next war seem "ok" to the average person when the press 'finds' it.
If a real expert gets talking in court or via lawyers to the press, then it gets much more interesting.
Costas Tsalikidis, the Greek telco whistleblower who was found hanged.
Spyware eavesdropped on the Greek prime Minister and other top officials’ cell phone calls; it even monitored the car phone of Greece’s secret service chief.
Adamo Bove head of security at Telecom Italia who exposed the CIA renditions via cell phone logs ‘fell’ to his death.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam was found hanged.

You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for oppressive Arab governments to be overthrown and replaced by even more oppressive Arab governments? Maybe you didn't find them that interesting, but some of us did.

Yeah, if they can't form a perfect representative democracy within a single year, then they deserve to live under dictatorial rule forever. It's high time we take up the white man's burden and show them how to live, because clearly they have no right to try to rule themselves.

Just out of curiosity, roughly how many fifths of a person would you say Arabs are?

Just out of curiosity, roughly how many fifths of a person would you say Arabs are?

That would depend on how many slaves he is voting for. Perhaps you are unaware that it was the slave owners who wanted slaves counted as whole people so that they could use the number of slaves they owned to increase their own political power.

I would call helping to end the phase of the Iraq war with the US Military being officially there, a bit more than a yawn:

That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi." The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians

Democracy != puppet government that doesn't even have sovereignty over the land(in the case or Iraq).

As for Israel, I think the GP's point would better be phrased as: "The US will never tolerate Arabic/Muslim democracies in the Middle East". Polls of most Arab countries have shown that people overwhelmingly dislike/hate both the US and Israel and see Iran as less of a threat or no threat at all. A true democratic government in any of these countries would definitely not be in the best interest of the US. It

Is it possible thought that many of these places don't like the US is because we support their oppressive dictator? What is the causality for their 'hate' of the US? Not that I know the answer is here, but we should at least know what caused their dislike of the US first. Perhaps getting out of their business would be a good first step to winning their support.

We keep hearing that from fans and boosters of Wikileaks, but it simply isn't true. Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments when it was a fact that assulted them nearly every day of their lives? Do you not know that many of those countries had been simmering under revolution or revolt for years? I guess the "White Man's Burden" is still with us in the form of "Wikileaks".

A Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi is generally credited with starting the Arab Spring after he set himself on fire when the police confiscated his fruit stand in December 2010. Less than a month after his self-immolation – he eventually died – President Zine al Abdedine Ben Ali fled Tunisia after 23 years in office. Several other self-immolations quickly follow Bouazizi’s, particularly in Egypt where that revolution would start a little more than a month later. -- Moroccan Protesters the Latest to Set Themselves on Fire [go.com]

The facts are that on 17 December last year, Mohamed, a market trader whose father had died when he was three and who had been helping to support his family financially since the age of 10, set himself on fire after a dispute with a government official over where he could sell his fruit and vegetables. At the time, it was widely reported that the municipal inspector, a woman named Fedia Hamdi with a reputation for strictness, had slapped Mohamed across the face – the ultimate insult in such a patriarchal Arab community. The confrontation seemed to pit an ordinary man, struggling to make a living, against the uniformed symbol of a corrupt regime. Bouazizi's suicide at the age of 26 was seen by many as an act borne of his intense frustration with authoritarian rule. It became the domino that fell and triggered a chain of revolutions across the Arab world. -- The slap that sparked a revolution [guardian.co.uk]

Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments

Strawman argument. The claimed effect of Wikileaks wasn't to "tell them how bad their government was", it was to "confirm" it. There is a difference between suspecting that your leaders are corrupt, and actually seeing classified intelligence reports from another country's diplomats detailing the exact corruption that is going on, and basically stating that your government operates more like the Mafia.

Would the revolution have happend without Facebook? Possibly - Berlin Wall fell long before people commonly had access to email. But does that mean that Facebook wasn't a factor? Obviously not: the fact that something was possible without X (where X is Facebook, Wikileaks etc.) does not mean that X was not a factor in this particular case.

Nobody is claiming that the Arab Spring happened because of Wikileaks, or because of Facebook or the internet. What people are claiming is that these things were contributing factors. Amnesty International named Wikileaks, the Internet, technology and journalism as being catalysts of the Arab Spring [guardian.co.uk] It's also worth pointing out that Qaddafi accused Wikileaks of being behind the Arab Spring in Tunisia [nytimes.com], so it's not as if it's only Wikileaks supporters who saw Wikileaks as being a factor. Julian Assange has said Wikileaks played a role, but was not the major factor in the Arab Spring:

He said WikiLeaks had ''played a significant role'' in the uprisings sweeping the Arab world by publishing secret documents about those countries' authoritarian regimes, but the site was not the major factor in the movements.

''It does look like we played a significant role in it. That said, the tinder of the Middle East was drying,'' he said, crediting the internet and satellite TV stations like al-Jazeera with major roles in the uprisings.

There’s been a lot of speculation, notably in the U.S., over the role social media played in the Tunisian revolution (it sure feels nice to say those two words.)

Wikileaks may have played a minor atmospheric rule in baring to the whole world what was whispered about the Ben Ali regime’s corruption, showing that US diplomats were aghast at the mafia nature of his regime.

Social media, from Twitter and Facebook to video upload sites, were crucial in spreading the word about what happened in a country where the press was tightly muzzled. It generated tremendous amounts of solidarity in the Arab world in beyond. But it’s just a means of communication, not a driver in itself.

At the end of the day, Tunisians took the streets because they had enough. They risked getting shot and beaten with no guarantee of success. And it’s likely that if they hadn’t heard about events around their country through Twitter and Facebook, they would have heard it by telephone.

I'm pretty sure that proof could be posted that the president eats babies, and a large segment of the population like yourself would say 'meh'. There was some rather nasty revelations in the Manning leaks, but I'm guessing you missed them or didn't cae.

I'm not a 'leftist', so I'll have to apologize for not fitting into your world of walking, talking strawmen.

Regardless, you seem to be under the (albeit sincerely naive) impression that all those things you list are still working in your favour, and that those in political and corporate power are beholden to your interests. They aren't. You're thinking is about 50 years too late - those were the 'good ole days' of benevolence and spirit, working against common enemies and using whatever means necessary to triumph.

In a world where governments are beholden to corporations with no loyalties, they are as likely to be working against you as they are for you. Get it yet?

Of course, and that's why the 'good ole days' are in quotes. There was a greater belief in those things post-war and a lot less of the cynicism of the current era.

Not that blind faith and naivete is necessarily a good thing, but they do make for a stronger nation, for better or for worse.

'Stronger' should be in quotes too. There was more faith in government and other institutions in the 1950s, yes - but the institutions in which that faith was placed were not in fact worthy of that faith. Building a nation on a lie did not actually make it stronger; the foundations were shaky even as the shiny chrome cladding on the outside of the building looked great.

This is the period in which the Korean war raged and the seeds of Vietnam began, ICBMs were built and deployed with the full intention of be

Regardless, you seem to be under the (albeit sincerely naive) impression that all those things you list are still working in your favour, and that those in political and corporate power are beholden to your interests. They aren't. You're thinking is about 50 years too late - those were the 'good ole days' of benevolence and spirit, working against common enemies and using whatever means necessary to triumph.

The thing that has changed is the enemy. This is really old wisdom, literally 2000 years at the least. If a country lacks outside enemies, it starts to find inside enemies. And since we don't do that christian/jew/black/whatever persecution thing anymore, it turned out that simply considering everyone else an enemy and taking the whole capitalist everyone-for-himself mantra seriously was the easiest solution.

Like all dogmas, once you take things too seriously, they start to go downhill.

In a world where governments are beholden to corporations with no loyalties, they are as likely to be working against you as they are for you.

You've smuggled self-fulfilling prophecy into the equation in ten words or less. Nicely done. I see the eye in the pyramid behind your vision of corporate unity.

In the modern world, the "beholden to" social graph is a complex beast. Where the selectorate is large, the sensible strategy is to produce public goods. Where the selectorate is small, the sensible strate

And principles are for chumps, and limits on government power,pah! those Founding Fathers was a bunch of commie queers! If you're not taking it up the rear every hour of every day as a card carrying member of the Cult of Authoritarianism, then your a Leftist fag!

This [youtube.com] was one of the main things i believe Manning is alleged to have leaked. It shows a reuters journalist and some children (and the usual bunch of Iraqi civilians) being gunned down by an attack helicopter for no reason.

because, the Espionage Act specifically uses the phrase "National Defense Information", which means that the information has to be pretty damned seriously related to the military, not a bunch of 'rumor collections from various countries'.

i mean, if what he gave out was pointless information, then he can't be guilty under that law.

You have people in the press that can look at dates, public info and then ask ex workers, historians if the info looks right.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries [wikipedia.org]
If the layout, date, departments and names don't fit, you have problems.
You can get vey detailed about one message or just look at the massive amount and ask...
Where is country x,y,x, why does it seem filtered, pre packaged... if a EU members spy agency is really so upset - why no real action?
You then have cases where a gov goes on raids or just pulls back to let it flow out as not to upset larger PR operations.

The US Govt hates wikileaks, but has never questioned the so called facts published by it. Which could mean they are either working with the US Govt, or that, they really havent published anything can be proved to be false. I personally go for the second possibility. You seem to a patriotic american and an apologist for the US Govt, I dont you would like either of the possibilities. Though I really doubt, if you go for the first.

There's a third possibility which is actually the most likely. They're just taking the same approach to the Wikileaks releases as they do to all classified data releases - neither confirm nor deny. Once a secret is out, all you have left is uncertainty as to whether or not it was a real secret. Confirming or denying it eliminates that uncertainty. So standard U.S. policy is to do neither. (Yes the confirmation or denial could be a lie, but there's really no need to lie about it if simply not commenting

its a good question and one that we have been struggling with since the dawn of human civilization. how do we know we are all not imaginary, or in a dream, or someone elses dream, or a computer like the Matrix?

but we do have a tool, 'science', which is based on evidence, and coming up with theories to fit the evidence. To badly paraphrase Carl Sagn in Cosmos --- science is not a perfect tool, but its the best one we have.